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How They Make LEGO Bricks
harajukboy writes "Businessweek.com shows us how the famous LEGO bricks are made. Among the new facts I picked up was that LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world, and that the process is so air tight that only 18 of 1 million pieces are considered defective." I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.
My work here is dung.
The article says they make 18 billion a year! Since they've been building bricks since 1958, that means there's a HELL of a lot of bricks somewhere.
I think a recycle your Lego campaign should start and you should send all your old Lego to me.
This is not just a grab to make sure I have more Lego than you.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I just love the way the factory floor has all sorts of bits of Lego scattered across it (the Lego that escaped!)
:)
I bet they don't walk around with bare feet there.
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I've actually seen (well, as far as you can "see") Lego bricks in production. Up until this year when they announced they were going to close it (as part of moving all their production to Eastern Europe, China, or Mexico), Lego ran a factory in Connecticut. Once upon a time, they used to allow kids to tour it. I must have been in middle school or so when I saw it.
IIRC, there's nothing particularly special about the production process. It's basic injection-molding. The plastic comes in bulk as small pellets, pre-dyed (I think, I'm a little fuzzy on this), and gets fed into machines that produce the bricks. I don't think that they make or dye the plastic on-site. The vast majority of the plant, as I remember it, was actually devoted to inspection, sorting/packing, and packaging for shipment. At the time this really surprised me; the "making stuff" part of the factory was far smaller than I had thought. It was cool to see them wheeling around big bins of bricks, though. (This was before they made quite as many special pieces as they seem to now.) I really should have brought a camera but never thought about it at the time. (I think I was probably in that period of life where I was trying hard not to show that I still thought Legos were really cool.) Somebody else visited and has a few photos here.
About the only thing I never worked out is how they get them to release from the molds so cleanly, and with such straight walls (normally to guarantee mold release you avoid straight walls and sharp edges/corners). On some bricks if you look closely though, you can see mold lines and sprues if you look in the bottom carefully.
It's sad to hear that they're closing the plant in CT; I had always hoped that maybe it was heavily automated enough to cope with the higher costs of labor in a high-cost area, but it seems not. I wonder what this leaves for industry in Connecticut these days? Without Lego, their principal exports are going to be nothing but a handful of helicopter parts and lawyers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
Well, I'd hope so. It's the best reason for having kids, really.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
http://www.math.ku.dk/~eilers/lego.html#howgetrigh t
There may be places where you need to speak apologetically about your use of LEGO. Slashdot is not one of them.
Hmm interesting that it's almost the same in degrees Fahrenheit and kelvin. That inspired me to figure out that:
574.5875 degrees Fahrenheit is exactly 574.5875 kelvin.
Billund is still manufacturing, but it's moving to Czech Republic, real soon now.
Enfield is moving its manufacturing and packing to Mexico, that should be complete by March.
They'll be hoding an internal job fair sometime this winter - if you want some creative, dedicated folks, you'll find them there.
Our FIRST team was sponsored by LEGO for several years until 1998 - we were working in their machine shop and got to see a great deal of the facility.
Back around 1990 when the original LEGO TC Logo came out, we worked with them on a few projects.
They're an amazing bunch, from the shop techs to the engineers to the line staff to the model team (still based in Enfield).
There are bowls of LEGO on every conference table, not just for brand vanity, but for people to toy with as they discuss and solve problems. There's even an offshoot company, LEGO Serious Play that does corporate team training based on doing things with LEGO.
One of their points of pride is that as they increased automation, they only displaced workers to other areas of the factory, they (at least back then) never tossed someone out of the site as their existing job was automated.
In 1990 the packing lines were controlled by an amazing array of personal computers, Apple II, PC, I believe we even saw a few Commodores.
They since standardized. The machines also page the engineering staff when there's an issue with one, this replaces the sound and light alarm they used to have.
They've had two sorts of molding machines - one series that let the bricks and flashing fall through to sorters, and another where arms picked up the flashing and let the bricks drop. People touring would ask why some were robots (= had arms) and others weren't!
Some of the parts are assembled on the lines, most are simply picked, sorted and packed into those perforated bags. If you notice the tiny dot on a minfig head, that's where the high-contrast optical system aligns each minifig head to the body. It's very cool to see.
We had engineer/parents from other companies who used the same molding machines and could not believe the quality LEGO was getting - I believe their quoted tolerance was 3/1000 of an inch. Look for "gates" where the plastic entered the mold, or punches where the machine tapped the brick to free it - good luck finding either - then remember what your scale model kits looked like.
First time through, we saw pallettes of boxes from Bayer. When I asked the engineers what they were getting from Germany, the answer was ABS plastic. Yes, they were shipping raw plastic over here, they're very particular - no metals allowed whatsoever. One of their engineers managed a program to get plastics from GE in Pittsfield MA 50 miles up the road to do the same thing - the savings reportedly bought them about 7 years time here in CT.
There are no heaters per se in a LEGO molding machine - the pellets are fed through increasingly smaller feed tubes by arbors, and the pressure and friction creates the heat. When they hit the molds, the plastic is about the consistency of toothpaste. They have a rogues gallery of sculptures created by leaks.
They filled a 55 gallon drum every night with the bricks that get swept off the floor - we offered to help them get rid of those, but they recycle them - I believe to a comb company.
Our second year at FIRST, the robot was approximating an arm with a shoulder, elbow and wrist. The ergonomics of the standard joysticks and buttons were a real challenge. So the team built a "waldo" out of LEGO, where the operator could lay their hand into it, and the robot would respond to the movements of the hand. All was well until the judges reminded us that LEGO was not in the kit of parts of alllowables list. They did offer us the chance to take our allowance of PVC pipe and moplding LEGO bricks out of that, and building the waldo out of them. The two LEGO engineers looked like someone just suggested they use Waterford crystal to haul horse manure. We went back to joysticks.
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I just bought my kids a DVD of other kids playing with legos and creating really neat toys. It's cheaper then buying all of those expensive legos and the kids on the DVD are far more creative than my kids. It's kind of like New Yankee Workshop for little children.
Wow, that sounds difficult. Why didn't you use your hands?
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